Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language

First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.

By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission

American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run businesses, practice vocations, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government - not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, "Try to fight this, and we'll ruin you."

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them

A pathbreaking neuroscientist reveals how our social instincts turn Me into Us, but turn Us against Them - and what we can do about it. The great dilemma of our shrinking world is simple: never before have those we disagree with been so present in our lives. The more globalization dissolves national borders, the more clearly we see that human beings are deeply divided on moral lines - about everything from tax codes to sexual practices to energy consumption - and that, when we really disagree, our emotions turn positively tribal.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.

Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America

The adoption of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965 enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. Yet fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power - over the right to vote, the central pillar of our democracy. A groundbreaking narrative history of voting rights since 1965, Give Us the Ballot tells the story of what happened after the act was passed.

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Here, Nassir Ghaemi draws from the careers and personal plights of such notable leaders as Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., JFK, and others from the past two centuries to build an argument at once controversial and compelling: the very qualities that mark those with mood disorders—realism, empathy, resilience, and creativity—also make for the best leaders in times of crisis.

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in Pursuit of Health

Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients.

Boys Adrift: Factors Driving the Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

Something scary is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, they are less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. Fully one-third of men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents, about a 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. Boys nationwide are increasingly dropping out of school; fewer are going to college. Family physician and research psychologist Dr. Leonard Sax presents practical solutions.

The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures

In The Invisible History of the Human Race, Christine Kenneally draws on cutting-edge research to reveal how both historical artifacts and DNA tell us where we come from and where we may be going. While some books explore our genetic inheritance and some popular television shows celebrate ancestry, this is the first book to explore how everything from DNA to emotions to names and the stories that form our lives are all part of our human legacy.

Conspiracies of the Ruling Class: How to Break Their Grip Forever

A Ruling Class have emerged in America against the hopes and designs of our Founding Fathers. Over the last hundred years, they have rejected the Constitution and expanded their own power, slowly at first and now rapidly. These people believe their actions are justified, because they think they are smarter than the rest of us - so smart they can run our lives better than we can.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over 40 years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

James C. Samans says:"Transformative to the point of being revolutionary"

You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

A leading neuroplasticity researcher, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the structure and neuronal firing patterns of the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology

Are men literally born to cheat? Does monogamy actually serve women's interests? These are among the questions that have made The Moral Animal one of the most provocative science books in recent years. Wright unveils the genetic strategies behind everything from our sexual preferences to our office politics - as well as their implications for our moral codes and public policies.

Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950 - 1980

Beginning in the 1950s, America entered a period of unprecedented social reform. This remarkable book demonstrates how the social programs of the 1960s and ’70s had the unintended and perverse effect of slowing and even reversing earlier progress in reducing poverty, crime, ignorance, and discrimination. Using widely understood and accepted data, it conclusively demonstrates that the amalgam of reforms from 1965 to 1970 actually made matters worse.

Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational, and Scientific

Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana, from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry. Colorful, illuminating, and at times irreverent, this is a fascinating listen for recreational users and patients, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this ubiquitous herb.

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life

Best-selling social historian Charles Murray has written a delightfully fussy - and entertaining - book on the hidden rules of the road in the workplace - and in life - from the standpoint of an admonishing, but encouraging, workplace grouch and taskmaster. Why the curmudgeon? The fact is that most older, more senior people in the workplace are closet curmudgeons. In today's politically correct world, they may hide their displeasure over your misuse of grammar or your overly familiar use of their first name without an express invitation. But don't be fooled by their pleasant demeanor....

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed

From the Sunday Times top ten bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, a captivating and brilliant exploration of one of our world's most underappreciated forces: shame. 'It's about the terror, isn't it?' 'The terror of what?' I said. 'The terror of being found out.' For the past three years, Jon Ronson has travelled the world meeting recipients of high-profile public shamings. The shamed are people like us - people who, say, made a joke on social media that came out badly, or made a mistake at work.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in - a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last 25 years we have seen a disturbing "opportunity gap" emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, regardless of their family background, should have a decent chance to improve their lot in life.

The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism

Americans today are frustrated and anxious. Our economy is sluggish and leaves workers insecure. Income inequality, cultural divisions, and political polarization increasingly pull us apart. Our governing institutions often seem paralyzed. And our politics has failed to rise to these challenges. No wonder, then, that Americans - and the politicians who represent them - are overwhelmingly nostalgic for a better time.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

Oxford professor and author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger joins Economist data editor and commentator Kenneth Cukier to deliver insight into the hottest trend in technology. "Big data" makes it possible to instantly analyze and draw conclusions from vast stores of information, enabling revolutionary breakthroughs in business, health, politics, and education. But big data also raises troubling social and privacy concerns sure to be a major talking point in the years ahead.

Publisher's Summary

From the best-selling author of Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, this startling long-lens view shows how America is coming apart at the seams that have historically joined our social classes.

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.

Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, Coming Apart demonstrates that a new upper class and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—a divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.

The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. This divergence puts the success of the American project at risk.

The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America. Its message is about all of America.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He first came to national attention in 1984 with Losing Ground. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives with his wife in Burkittsville, Maryland.

What the Critics Say

“A timely investigation into a worsening class divide no one can afford to ignore.” (Publishers Weekly)

“[Charles Murray] argues for the need to focus on what has made the US exceptional beyond its wealth and military power… religion, marriage, industriousness, and morality.” (Booklist)

“This is an immensely important and utterly gripping book…Coming Apart is a model of rigorous sociological inquiry, yet it is also highly readable. After the chronic incoherence of Occupy Wall Street, it comes as a blessed relief. Every American should read it. Too bad only the cognitive elite will.” (Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard and fellow of the Hoover Institution)

Murray uses statistics from 1960 to 2010 as a basis for his arguments as to how our society has become fragmented into the haves and the have nots. This could be a dry oration on statistics, but it is artfully woven into a captivating story. I would rank this as one of the best books to read if you want to understand the cultural changes that have occurred over the past 50 years.

Would you consider the audio edition of Coming Apart to be better than the print version?

This is a fantastic little bit of social science, but the author includes a lot of demographic data that can get confusing when in audio format. You'll lose some of the details by listening to it instead of reading it, but it will only matter if you're hoping to use the book as source material for research of your own. The narrator did what he could with it. Otherwise, well-performed and researched.

IMPORTANT FOR AUDIOThe format of "Coming Apart" is awkward for an audiobook because of the many references to graphs and tables. There's an accompanying PDF of these with the audiobook. I found that by reading the PDF before listening to the audiobook, I was able to following the reading fairly easily.

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There are plenty of professional journalists who have written extensive reviews and commentaries on "Coming Apart." For a particularly good one, see "Is the White Working Class Coming Apart?" by David Frum, or the review in the Wall Street Journal. These may be more useful than reviews given here.

"Coming Apart" has two basic sections: a description of the situation followed by analysis and opinions.

The description of the situation is brilliant. Regardless of your political persuasion, the description will probably strike you as being largely accurate about the changes and problems in America's socio-economic class structure.

Following this brilliant presentation, Murray gives his views and analysis from a libertarian viewpoint. Murray's analysis is what's flawed. While Murray does a good job at identifying why the upper class has become richer and larger, and why the children of the upper class are much more likely to remain in the upper class than they would have been prior to 1960, Murray's attempts to explain why the lower class has grown and is sociologically falling apart doesn't hold together. For politically interested readers with moderate and liberal views, this analysis may be particularly interesting, as it is a serious attempt at sociology from a libertarian/conservative perspective, and may provide some insights about how your political opposites think.

Have already listened to it twice. This is an important book for those wanting to understand one of the dynamics shaping our society -- bifurcation by cognitive ability -- and its implications. While that was not new to me, its dimensions and its effects added to what I had already dimly perceived. What was new was how and why it was destroying "American Exceptionalism". Murray lays out the drivers of human happiness and how the modern welfare state enervates true human happiness. His prescription for a potential rebirth is quite interesting, and plausible in theory, but I don't think it will happen any time soon, and certainly not soon enough to prevent the withering away of American Exceptionalism. Too many decades of brainwashing (I tried to think of a less pejorative term but could not) have shaped an important segment of our population to the absolute need for and advantages of the welfare state. Only a complete collapse of the welfare state, which is probably decades away now that the printing of money has not only become acceptable but demanded, will force us to rethink what we have been told and learned.

Who was your favorite character and why?

None

What does Traber Burns bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I probably would not have had the time to read the book. I listen to books when I exercise. Otherwise my day is quite full and there would be little time to read as many books as I listen to.

Book will engage you, make you think, challenge your preconceptions with a data driven analysis of sociological changes in America over the last 40-50 years. The author is optimistic that the American character can rise to the occasion. I hope he is correct.

This may be just me, but it felt like his tone was very judgemental. It's possible that that's how the author wanted it, since the tone overall felt judgemental to the described group but it was very hard to listen to.

Was Coming Apart worth the listening time?

No, I was very excited about the content (especially since I started it after the recent election) but I found it very disappointing. There are a lot of charts referenced, which I obviously couldn't see. The overall tone was very disapproving of this new group and everything they did and I couldn't quite figure out his point, was it just to talk about how this new group was different? It had an odd tone.

A truly fascinating book. Murray posits his theory that the social fabric of the U.S. is fraying at the seams as the institutions that defined the nation and separated us as a people from the Europeans are in sharp decline. He goes on to say that these institutions are dying in particular among the lower classes and uses data to support his theory. A must read for all those of every political persuasion must read.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

As a parent, I have a stake in the future of the U.S., and the potential for a failure of the American project, as described as a potential future scenario by Murray, does create anxiety. The juxtaposition that Murray draws with American and European social institutions and cultural norms (work ethic, civic responsibility, religiosity) were particularly interesting.

Any additional comments?

As an American near 50, I can see many of the signs of the fraying of American culture and civic life that Murray describes. Having traveled extensively in Europe, I can see the potential future that the U.S. is approaching, and the worst case scenarios described by Murray are truly frightening (Europe has a glorious past, but no future). The hopeful scenarios for a brighter future are at least equally plausible though, which does leave room for hope. I do highly recommend this book.